Looking to Look
by electric.currant
Summary: If Emma Swan were a hard-boiled private investigator...


It was a kid. Not a goat, of course, but a real, live human child, and it had waltzed into my office about a half hour ago. I didn't exactly know what to do with it as I had very little experience with this type of animal. Sure, I had probably been one quite a while ago, but I liked to keep my memory as short and to the point as possible. A bunch of useless memories of jumping on trampolines and semi-nude pillow fights and stealing gum from convenience stores didn't pay bills.

I was sitting behind my desk, and the lights were off, and the sign on the door definitely said the detective was out, but maybe the kid wasn't literate yet. When did kids learn to read these days? Did they still learn cursive and diagramming sentences? I didn't know and didn't much care, and I'd rather have been left alone.

"I'm Henry," he said.

I downed the rest of my birthday bourbon-it was my birthday, and I wasn't interested in the empty sugar of a cupcake when I could have the existential emptiness of a half-drained bottle of Jim Beam, enjoyed alone in my office-and looked at his wan little mug.

"And I'm guessing you know who I am."

"Of course. You're the savior."

"As a Presbyterian, I take offense to that," I said. I poured another two fingers. This might turn out to be a doozy, and I had the sneaking suspicion I might want to be half toasted for the rest of it.

"No, I mean-well kind of-I'm sorry." He paused, contrite, and then looked into me better than a man three times his age. "I'm your son." I took another swallow. He wasn't lying-or he didn't think he was. Sure, I'd had my wild youth, but even if I did believe him, closed adoptions were closed adoptions, and this was a conversation I had signed a lot of paperwork not to have to have.

"Look, kid. I don't know what you know about boring grown-up stuff like laws, but legally you can't even be my client, let alone my son. So you probably ought to just beat it. Get back on the bus you took here, and forget you ever saw my face."

"I have money," he said. He dug into his backpack and produced a wad of presidents. "To pay you to investigate stuff, not to be my mom."

"Like I said. I can't take you on as a client. You're five."

"I'm ten. And I have $500 cash." Five hundred dollars cash would buy me those mules I'd been eying and quite a bit of good Chinese food. Ethics were flexible. And maybe I wanted to know what the hell this kid was up to.

"All right, kid. What do you want me to investigate?" Maybe he had lost his puppy, and I could find it and then return him to his mother, and she would pay me with money that probably wasn't stolen.

He furrowed his smart little brow and shifted in his seat.

"Well, my mom's the Evil Queen and-"

"Hold the phone. I thought you said I was your mom." It was all crazy, but I figured I might engage him anyway.

"My other mom. My adopted mom."

I nodded at him, and he continued his story. Apparently, fairy tales were real except all the characters were cursed or something and didn't know they were fairy tale characters, and the Evil Queen had adopted him, and I was supposed to come to his hometown in Maine and break the curse somehow. And he knew all this because of a book his fourth grade teacher had given him.

I took another drink. It was worse than I had suspected.

"So?" He said at the conclusion. "Will you help me?"

"I'll do a lot of things for $500."

xxxxx

It was a good thing I was not legally his mother because I should not have been driving, but I drove all the way from Boston to his hamlet in Maine. We stopped for coffee and burgers halfway there, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

I really didn't feel bad about it when I saw his mother.

I convinced him I could do better work if we pretended I was just bringing him back from his walkabout and then I inconspicuously poked around for a few days. So I took him home to the grandest house in town, and out ran the grandest lady in town-probably the grandest lady this side of the Mississippi.

She was all legs and lips and eyebrows, and I could've watched her make her frenzied way down her sidewalk for several hours and paid money to do it.

She embraced him and scolded him and sent him inside with some joker who I learned later was the sheriff, and then we were standing there along her perfectly pruned bushes.

"What have you done with my son?" she said, a breathy reprimand-sexy and mean although she was probably trying to be neither.

"Kid claims he's my son. He showed up on my doorstep." I was being obtuse so that she might quietly yell at me more. It worked. Her eyes were blazing, and she was standing so close to me that I could smell her fancy perfume and casually see down her satin blouse.

"A closed adoption means-"

"Oh, I know exactly what it means, sweetheart. That's why I brought him back to you." She pursed her lips.

"Well, it'd be best if you would blow."

"I intend to." I looked her up and down, and she looked at me looking her up and down. "I think I'll stay in town a couple of days, though. It's my birthday, and I need a little r and r."

"You'll find neither of those r's here, Miss..."

"Swan. Emma Swan. And I'm a pretty good detective. I can usually find whatever it is I'm looking for."

She squared her small shoulders and faced off with me.

"This is my town, Miss Swan, and you don't even know what you're looking for."

I stepped even closer to her.

"Sometimes a detective just looks to look."


End file.
